| Sumario: | Part of a special issue on the role of fairness in people's lives. In a paper first delivered at the 14th conference in the Social Research series held on April 14–15, 2006, at the New School in New York, the writer discusses some recent research by experimental economists that investigated alternatives to pure self-interest as the main human motive in most economic contexts. After reviewing some of the issues raised by the social-preferences literature, the writer presents several simple games that he tested with his colleague to develop further insight into the nature of social preferences. He concludes that, even if some of the findings observed in experimental games are partially artifacts of the context in which most of these experiments were conducted, the experiments still reveal much about the effect of context on social preferences.
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